“Do you really think so?”
“I am certain of it. People nowadays won’t travel eight miles an hour, or be satisfied to hear of events ten days after they’ve happened. Life is too short for all this now, and, as we can’t lengthen our days, we must shorten our incidents. We are all more or less like that gentleman Mathews used to tell us of at Boulogne, who said to the waiter, ‘Let me have some-thing expensive; I am only here for an hour.’ Have you ever thought seriously on the matter?”
“Never,” said I.
“You ought, then,” said he. “I tell you again, we are all in the same category with flint locks and wooden ships—we belong to the past. Don’t you know it? Don’t you feel it?”
“I don’t like to feel it,” said I, peevishly.
“Nonsense!” cried he, laughing. “Self-deception does nothing in the matter, say what one will. A modern diplomatist is only a ‘smooth-Bore.’ What ‘our own correspondent’ represents, I leave to your own modesty.”
“It will be a bad day for us when the world comes to that knowledge,” said I, gloomily.
“Of course it will, but there’s no help for it. Old novels go to the trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also? At all events, I have a scheme for our transition state—a plan I have long revolved in my mind—and there’s certainly something in it.
“First of all realise it, as the Yankees say, that neither a government nor a public will want either of us. When the wires have told that the Grand-Duke Strong-grog-enofif was assassinated last night, or that Prince Damisseisen has divorced his wife and married a milliner, Downing Street and Printing-house Square will agree that all the moral reflections the events inspire can be written just as well in Piccadilly as from a palace on the Neva, or a den on the Danube. Gladstone will be the better pleased, and take another farthing off ‘divi-divi,’ or some other commodity in general use and of universal appreciation. Don’t you agree to that?”
“I don’t know.”